How to brew a perfect French Press coffee

Hi, I'm Ryan from two bears coffee, and today I'm going to be showing you how to make the perfect French pressed coffee.

If you like your coffee very creamy with a lot of body, this is what you're going to want to do. So, let me show you what you're going to need.

First, you're going to need a kettle. Now, I've got my gooseneck kettle here. You can use whatever kettle you're comfortable with at home. I just find the gooseneck kettle gives me a lot more precision with where I'm pouring my water. You're going to need some sort of kitchen scale because we want to keep our variables consistent. That means knowing exactly how much coffee we're putting in, and exactly how much water we're putting in. We need our French press, of course. Now, I know French presses come in different sizes; you can adjust your weights to suit that. Now, I've got one where we're going to make about 350 grams of coffee. We've got our spoon to stir our coffee. Now, most French presses come with a wooden paddle or a plastic paddle to stir the coffee. A spoon will work just as well, but if you have those you are of course more than welcome to use them.

I've got my coffee this is the Two Bears Columbia Pillimue and I've got about 30 grams of it here. I've also got a timer. That's also very important in terms of keeping our variables consistent knowing exactly how long we're taking to brew this coffee. Okay, let's get started!

So, the first thing I'm going to do is do what's called the bloom. Now I've got my 30 grams of coffee here. I'm going to be doing a 16 to 1 extraction ratio. Now, what that means is I'm going to be putting 16 times the water in as I am in the coffee. So, the first thing I'm going to do is put my 30 grams of coffee in my French press here. And we have it. So, I'm going to zero out my scale again here and let's do the bloom. So, I'm going to grab my kettle, and we're just going to put 60 grams of water in here just so that that coffee can start to extract without really brewing yet. Perfect! That's going to do it. I'm just going to take my spoon and give this a nice little stir here to get those grinds moving. Make sure they're all submerged in the water. That should do it. And we're all set. We're going to wait about 30 seconds before we do our next brew.

Now that we've waited about 30 seconds for our bloom to finish, we're ready to do our big pour. As I said before, we did a 16 to 1 extraction, so I'm going to be doing about 350 grams of water in here. So, let's go for it.

I've got my kettle preheated to 96-97 degrees Fahrenheit. And here we go. Make sure we finish right on 350. That should do it. Perfect! Now we're not going to give it a stir here. We're just going to put our lid on, set our timer for four minutes, and we are good to go.

Now that our four minutes have elapsed, it's time to plunge this coffee. Now I'm going to give you a special tip that's really going to up your French press game. So, before I plunge it, I'm going to take the lid off, I'm going to take my spoon and just scoop off this top layer of crust that is formed on the top. Now the reason for this is that if I were to leave that on and plunge it, I'm going to re-agitate the coffee underneath and then I can get that over-extracted heavy gummy sort of French press coffee and that's really not what we want here. We want something clean, we want something flavorful and we want something well extracted. So, now that that's been taken off, I'm just going to put my lid on and slowly but evenly plunge this all the way to the bottom. Beautiful! And I want to serve this right away because the longer this coffee stays in here with the grinds, the more extracted it's going to get because it is still in contact. So, I am going to pour it right away here. Beautiful! And that is it. We have our perfect French press coffee. Enjoy!